Skeptical about the radical potential of multicultural education given its cooptation by mainstream educational discourses, this dissertation explores the possible existence of counternarratives of Blackness within commercialized popular culture. In light of the fact that Blacks watch television at astronomical rates unparalleled to other U.S demographic groups, I interrogate Black Entertainment Television (BET), the nation’s first African American owned and operated multimedia conglomerate, in order to illuminate possible counter-hegemonic narratives of Blackness. I argue that in order for multicultural education to engender any substantial educational and social transformation, the discourse must be rearticulated, from a postcolonial and cultural studies perspective, as the study of youth identity formation which centers pedagogy around discursive practices that influence the construction of youth subjectivities. From a postcolonial and cultural studies perspective, multicultural education is about understanding, reaffirming, and “troubling” identities. It is also about understanding how identities are discursively produced, represented, and performed in society. As such, the mass media and sites such as BET must be subjected to intense critique as an integral dynamic of multiculturalism. My project makes the case for a syncretic pedagogy which employs critical media literacy as the curriculum framework and problematizes the essentialist and binary logics that have come to characterize multicultural education in the United States.

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